Prior to the advent and prolific use of distributed network environments such as the Internet, customer service sessions typically occurred over a teleconference between a customer service agent or service specialist and a customer. These teleconferences, which incidentally are still very popular today, are initiated by a customer placing a phone call to a customer service agent. The customer service agent's phone receives the call through a public-switched telephone network (PSTN). Many support centers handle a large volume of inquiries, usually by phone, for sales, information, customer support and other services. Typical support centers provide the ability to route multiple incoming, customer-initiated calls to agents which provide sales, information, or support on behalf of an entity interested in establishing or maintaining a relationship with the customer.
Modern support center systems selectively route incoming calls based on a number of factors such as the number called or dialed, the originating number, the queued sequence of the caller, the geographic location of the caller, accumulated caller history, and other relevant criteria. Once the system has evaluated the inbound caller's information, if any, the system searches for an available agent to service the call. Availability of agents may be dependent on any number of factors such as a skill area, level of that skill and/or a schedule of the agent. The number of agents within the contact center and available to the system may often be limited by the physical space available for the agents to operate. Contact centers have to deal with a limited number of agents to handle a large number of incoming customer calls. Typically, when an end user initiates a contact with the service center, the end user has to know or maintain the detailed information regarding how to reach people and/or obtain services from the service center.
Traditional contact centers bring all interactions such as; voice, email, chat into a single location in which a large staffing of agents are setup to handle. Over the past several years many companies have looked for lower cost staffing by leveraging large business process outsourcing or BPO's that could leverage their off shore locations with large staffing of agents that work at a much lower cost distributing the traffic across such locations. They have also reached out to associates working from their homes as a way to reduce costs. What was not considered or leveraged was utilizing the associates already supporting users in a face to face setting such as a retail or business establishment where the Associates deal with situations daily and are subject matter experts (SME's) for the products and services of the establishment in which they are employed.
Technology is reaching into these establishments giving them the ability to provide more services for their patrons. Retail and other businesses still have problems with finding the right people to support their customer base especially since they are only able to (where they can) train those individuals who are employed by them. Outsourcing has been a trend for many years leveraging SME's in a contact center, but these individuals are trained by the manufacturer regarding the services they have put in the field for consumers and do not always hear or get involved with the customer regarding problems encountered with these services and products as the retail associates do. The retail establishments get hit with these problems and are on the front lines dealing with each customer that walks through their doors.